The Afterlives of an Author: Lawrence and British Culture in the 1930s

It is entirely appropriate that the protagonist of Cyril Connolly’s novel The Rock Pool (1936), a literary-minded undergraduate from Oxford who is spending a summer observing the human wildlife on the French Riviera, should be aware of the place where one of the major writers of the early twentieth century died. Lawrence’s death occurred, in Valentine Cunningham’s phrase, with ‘convenient tidiness’, on 2 March 1930, at the beginning of a rich, complex and furiously contested decade in British literary history. And although Lawrence could not participate in or contribute to the events and cultural practices of the ten years after his death, he does appear, in certain senses, to have presided over many of them. Reading through Cunningham’s comprehensive and brilliant survey of the motifs and accents in the writing of the nineteen-thirties, it is striking how frequently Lawrence is mentioned as having initiated or addressed many of those seemingly ‘typical’ preoccupations which are so often discussed as if they were entirely specific to that decade.

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